This Week on perl5-porters (15-21 December 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (15-21 December 2003)
  A year ends in the little world of the Perl 5 porters, and perl itself
  turns older. Hopefully this doesn't mean that the development is
  stalled. Read below what happened this week among the porters.

Happy Birthday, Perl
  Perl turned 16 years old, and for this occasion, Richard Clamp released
  perl 1.0_16.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031218081226.C22E2F5CB0%40phoenix.squirrel.nl

More MakeMaker issues
  Rafael Garcia-Suarez remarks that the core module SDBM_File can't be
  built on AIX with the xlC C compiler. Due to a post-5.8.2 change in
  MakeMaker, the Makefile.PL for SDBM_File was tweaked, and this caused
  this failure; but apparently that tweak is no longer necessary.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031215181953.631460ab.rgarcia%40hexaflux.com

  Alan Burlison also requested that MakeMaker's version cross-checking
  could be disabled, in order to help his module Solaris-PerlGcc, which
  allows to compile XS perl modules on Solaris with gcc against the
  system's perl.

      http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-12/msg00621.html

  Finally, Ilya Zakharevich proposed patches to improve a few things on
  MakeMaker.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031218203848.GA7783%40math.berkeley.edu

Clone fixes
  Stas Bekman filed a ticket for a bug he reported before, bug #24660 :
  weak references can't be properly cloned between interpreters. This
  makes them currently unuseful for solving thread programming problems.
  Elizabeth Mattijsen reports a similar problem (bug #24663) : assigning
  an object to a weakened copy after cloning produces a panic error
  message.

  Those bugs were fixed by Enache Adrian. There are still problems and
  Enache thinks that new ones are waiting to be discovered.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031218203725.GA1181%40ratsnest.hole

POSIX::setuid() not perlish enough
  Stas Bekman reported as bug #24641 that POSIX::setuid() doesn't update
  the $< and $> variables, while it affects correctly the program
  environment. The same problem exists with POSIX::setgid() as well.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-3.0.7_01-24641-68239.15.8235086069146%40perl.org

Signal handlers in eval{} blocks
  Bug #24699 demonstrates that signals handlers, once set local()ly in an
  eval{} block, might be restored *after* the block is exited. This
  causes problems if the eval was present to trap an exception thrown by a
  temporary signal handler. Rafael suggests a workaround.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-3.0.7_01-24699-68573.13.2276312695285%40perl.org

Substitution Bug
  Ton Hospel found bug #24704, which demonstrates a case where a character
  mysteriously disappears in an innocent-looking substitution. Sadahiro
  Tomoyuki finds out that this is due to a problem with the offset to
  which the actual "char*" is stored internally. Marty Pauley proposes a
  patch.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-3.0.7_01-24704-68587.10.0650134616711%40perl.org

In Brief
  Continuing a thread from last week, Scott Walters has a clever use for
  tieable stashes : method overloading on method signature.

  Craig Berry ported perl to the recent OpenVMS 8.1 on Itanium I64.

  Enache Adrian continues to hunt down and fix memory leaks.

  Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes found a contrived case where the "Too late to
  run CHECK block" warning is not produced (bug #24684) :

      INIT { eval "CHECK {print qq:in check in init\n:}" }

  Tels proposed new method names for Math::BigInt, to make the interface
  more consistent :

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=200312191051.13468%40bloodgate.com

About this summary
  This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are
  published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, which
  subscription address is [email protected]. Corrections
  and comments are welcome.